So my joke to satellite operators and insurers at Satellite 2018 was that they’d better watch out for an increase in launch risk, if Elon is going to suck up the best talent at SpaceX for his BFR project. Or perhaps some of those people will simply decide to leave the company, like SpaceX’s director of software engineering.

As Musk continues serenely on with his SpaceX focus, at Tesla things have been going from bad to worse this week, with Tesla’s heads of engineering and production writing a (conveniently leaked) memo on how they planned to free up workers for the Model 3 line this week in order achieve the “incredible victory” of producing 300 Model 3s in a day. No one seems to have remarked that back in September 2016, a near identical memo came from Elon Musk personally (and was even leaked to the same reporter), which seems to confirm that Musk has stepped back from direct involvement in Tesla’s production woes.

That’s all in sharp contrast to Musk’s camping expedition on the roof of the Gigafactory last fall, and raises the question as to how long Musk will be lost in SpaceX affairs, and how he will divide his time between the two businesses in future. Certainly he will be critical to Tesla’s upcoming fundraising efforts, and I’m sure Tesla’s investors thought they would be getting a lot more of Musk’s attention in exchange for his latest $2.6B pay package.